3 out of 5

Label: Ship to Shore

Produced by: Dietrich Schoenemann (mastered by)

This rating is somewhat due to presentation, although I think Ship to Shore did a logical job of giving us the full Phantasy Star score, which then gave the recording certain limitations… and in terms of cost and thoroughness, I’m not going to say I know a better approach.

Rewinding slightly: I never owned a Master System, the 8-bit Sega machine on which this game, in North America, appeared. I’m not used to its minimal-range “Programmable sound generator” (PSG) sound, but it’s akin to external speakers on old school 80s / early 90s computers – before you had sound cards. Not unpleasant by any means, and certainly capable of bouncy beats, but perhaps if you’re not composing specifically for that, tunes pumped through it may not land as intended. More on that in a moment.

I played Phantasy Star II back and forth on the Genesis, and was stuck to the series thereafter, but didn’t get around to playing PS I until a GBA port much later. Genesis era: I’m in the den, sucked into the TV and the games – the music made an impact. GBA is much later: I’m a young adult, maybe playing on the subway or inbetween other tasks; I don’t often have the music on, or am paying much attention to it. So I have no nostalgia hooking me to the original Phantasy Star, or Tokuhiko Uwabo’s tunes.

If I’m understanding the wiki page, the game was able to take advantage of one of the Japanese updates to the NA-released Master System, which added an FM chip to the deal: nine more channels to the PSG’s (I think) four. To me, this suggests that Uwabo’s score was made for this expanded aural palette; the Master System – using the PSG – version is, in that sense, a “detuned” version of it. Somewhat sillily, I’d call it a chiptune version.

This Ship to Shore release brings us both of those: PSG on side A, FM on side B, each filling up nearly the totality of recorded space on each side (which are, to be clear, the same length, as they’re the same songs). What this means is that StS followed a template for every cut: loop twice, then fade. Some of those loops are slightly longer, but these ultimately amount to snippets, excepting the opening and closing themes. Now, for sure, that’s how these were composed: as loops. But part of the decisions made behind these re-presentations of classic scores – this is me making this up just from the collection I own…. – is determining how much to loop a given track, since old school tunes are often less than a minute of uniqueness. And some of the songs on PS work as interstitial, less-than-a-minute bleeps, but some definitely deserved more room to breathe. Combine that with the limited range of PSG; combine that with my lack of familiarity with the tracks, and listening to the A-side is pretty unremarkable.

Uwabo’s opening theme still for sure makes an impact. It’s amazingly deep – sad and adventurous – all with a few notes, and that works whether in PSG or FM. This is also true of some of the more “major” themes, like the Dark Force battle and end theme: these have notable emotional depth, even from afar. But inbetween, the stuff, in PSG form and minimized to a minute of play, is just a general sweep of upbeat or chill; it’s boppy and not unpleasant, but also somewhat unremarkable.

And then you listen to the FM version.

Mind blown.

While the short looping is still kinda frustrating, the range of the low end to high end just blows up the scope and impact of these tunes, with the track names vibing exactly with whatever feeling is conveyed, whether it’s exploratory or a sense of danger or, yeah, sometimes just chilling in the item shop. And the additional ante up on those already-solid themes is striking.

After you’ve digested the FM, you can go back to the PSG, and hear it better: the digitized drums and tinny low end become more prominent. I get a sense of how, if this was the version I played as a kid, sucked into my TV as I was with Genesis, that these tracks could hit home. But it takes some work as an outsider.

The 8-page booklet included has some glorious illustrations and a nicely informed and glowing essay from Limited Run Games person Jeremy Parish, who does include some blurbs about how the presentation of this score may not accurately represent what it was like to play it, as I’m sort of noting above – it’s nice to have my feelings validated by this essay-writin’ person I’ve never met. The recording also sounds very warm on both sides; for sure a quality job by Ship to Shore.

…Who, I think, did the best possible they could for this release, as stretching this to two LPs probably wouldn’t have made sense, and having both PSG and FM also made sense, but all that brought some inherent limitations. Had this just been the FM version, expect that rating to go up a notch, but I also think there’s value in having the two to compare, even if I’ll ultimately just skip to the B-side from now on.